After a 205-day journey through space, NASA?s InSight lander is safely on the surface of Mars. Tasked with peering beneath the Martian surface and mapping the planet?s underworld, InSight touched down just before 3 p.m. ET in a sunny patch of boring landscape inside the equatorial plains of Elysium Planitia.

Anxious teams of scientists and engineers, clustered together at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, knew the spacecraft had survived its wild and tricky descent to the red planet?s surface after receiving data suggesting the lander had touched down safely?followed by an image from InSight itself showing a dusty, alien horizon with a single robot foot.

?This is what we really hoped and imagined in our mind?s eye,? says JPL?s Rob Manning, a systems engineer on the InSight team.

But the spacecraft?s home team isn?t fully celebrating just yet: For its mission to succeed, InSight must also deploy its solar panels, and that confirmation signal won?t arrive for a few more hours.

Assuming it does, the spacecraft will officially be the newest member in an elite fleet of interplanetary robots currently exploring the red planet?including the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which monitored InSight?s descent.

This is, of course, fantastic news, and I had a countdown timer set on my laptop following it's progression ever since it launched

It's always a bit of a mindbender when you realise that the data we're all receiving happened in the past, including whether it had landed successfully or not. It's going to make conversation between Earth and Mars a little tricky when we finally start living there.

Also, and completely irrelevant, but I noticed watching the news that NASA uses Windows 7

How long does it take for radio waves/data to reach Mars? Surely not that long?

I am, as always, incredibly excited about and fascinated by anything involving space exploration/discovery. I absolutely can't WAIT for the mission to Europa (Jupiter's moon that has a huge water ocean under the crust and appears to have organic matter in there, and as such is a good candidate for the possibility of life in some form to possibly exist there) to come to fruition.